Clay Eaters by Gregory Kan

Gregory Kan’s Clay Eaters is a deeply introspective poetry collection that explores themes of displacement, memory, and loss through a series of interconnected vignettes. Eerie landscapes and fragmented recollections are pulled together by Kan to create personal histories, military experiences, and ancestral echoes, creating a meditation on what it means to navigate identity and grief.

Kan’s mastery of form is evident in his fluid, almost cinematic sequencing of images and emotions. One can imagine long panoramic sweeping shots of the various locations as the collection traverses multiple geographies—Singapore, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the spectral space in between—charting the poet’s own experiences as well as the histories that have shaped these places. Particularly striking are the sections recalling Kan’s time as a conscripted intelligence officer in the Singapore Armed Forces. His descriptions of Tekong Island, emptied of its former inhabitants and repurposed for military training, imbue the landscape with an eerie, liminal quality. The island, shrouded in stories of haunted outposts and inexplicable disappearances, becomes a site of both physical and psychological estrangement. Kan’s precise, almost clinical observations give these passages a haunting resonance:

Jeeps that wouldn’t start after sundown / Compasses going haywire / Soldiers getting separated / Abruptly unable to hear or see one another.

Yet Clay Eaters is not simply a meditation on the unusual or eeroe; it is also a profoundly personal and tender exploration of familial bonds. The slow decline of Kan’s father, the grief of watching a loved one fade, and the complex dynamics of an evolving family unit are rendered with striking clarity. These moments are not sentimentalised but rather presented with a quiet honesty, allowing the weight of absence to settle in the spaces between words. The dining table, a recurring motif, becomes a site of transformation—once a centrepiece of familial unity, later an anchor amidst shifting relationships.

Perhaps most unexpectedly, Kan also turns his poetic gaze to the loss of a beloved pet, drawing parallels between the hunter’s instincts of his late cat, Gilgamesh, and his own military training. The cat’s hyper-awareness, its finely tuned survival instincts, echo the poet’s own attempts to map the terrain of memory and belonging.

What makes Clay Eaters so compelling is its ability to hold multiple perspectives in tension—past and present, history and myth, the deeply personal and the expansively universal. Kan’s meticulous craft ensures that each section contributes to a larger, interwoven tapestry of meaning. Lyrical, fragmented, and deeply moving, Clay Eaters cements Gregory Kan’s reputation as one of New Zealand’s most distinctive and accomplished poets.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Auckland University Press